Looking for some new ideas and activities to teach cladograms and phylogenetic trees? Check out this list below of fun activities and interactive websites. 1. Cladogram Construction: This free activity from Carolina Biological is nice and simple- a great way to introduce cladograms to your students. It has students construct
If you haven’t used small student whiteboards in your classroom, I promise you, you are missing out. As soon as the whiteboards come out, I have automatic buy-in from students. Students love writing on them, and as a teacher I love them because they are great for visual learners, and
Do your students struggle to learn vocabulary for your class? Science can be very vocabulary heavy and sometimes there is no way around it. It’s even more frustrating when you have to teach two different words that mean the same thing, because you aren’t sure which will show up on
It can be frustrating when students are absent on lab days. You spend a lot of time setting up and often spend money out of your own pocket for supplies. If you are doing labs often or teach multiple preps, dealing with student absences just gets harder to juggle. By
If you’ve scoured the internet looking for fun Karyotype activities like I have, you know they are few and far between. Most activities involve students cutting out 23 chromosomes, finding the homologous pair on a worksheet, and gluing them together. This activity ends with paper scraps everywhere, missing chromosomes, and
Models can be powerful tools when teaching science. They allow students to visualize concepts that can be difficult to picture in their heads.If you ask students what the most abundant gas in the atmosphere is, their first guess is usually oxygen. And when you say no, their second guess tends
I posted on Instagram last week pictures of preparing agar for my go-to first week of school lab: testing the 5 second rule. It’s a great lab for back to school because students are super engaged and it’s a good way to review variables and how to set up a
Meme from @DigitalDivideConquer Today is my first day back to school and my 12th year teaching. (No, I’m not actually typing this August 5th, I scheduled it out in advance. Because we all know the first day is EXHAUSTING and I’ll be in bed by 8pm. Plus this is my
If you read my blog post on recommended summer science reads, you saw my confession that I’m not generally a big non-fiction reader. I love to read, but fiction is my go-to. As I was compiling a science book list for students and teachers, I kept seeing and getting recommended
*If you are already familiar with how CRISPR works to make GMOs and just want the teaching resources, hop down below the Youtube video* Some people are terrified of the phrase “Genetically modified organism,” yet they are literally everywhere. Roughly 75% of the foods in grocery stores have been genetically
Even though I have taught life science most of my career and not physical science, I still feel it is important for students to understand polarity and electronegativity. If students don’t understand polarity, they won’t understand why the cell membrane has a hydrophobic and hydrophilic region. Understanding polarity also helps
When we ask students to review each other’s work and give feedback, we often hear…“Why did you do that?” or“It’s just wrong.” or“It’s good” (even when it’s not). Teaching students to give effective feedback is hard and takes a lot of student practice. And then more practice. If you are
